The Stars Never Rise

by Rachel Vincent

  When we finally turned in to the rear grounds of a complex I knew, I pulled Finn to a halt with me. “Here? You’re staying here?” Anabelle had lived there with her parents, before she’d joined the Church. Many more of my classmates lived in that very complex. “This is possibly the worst place to hide in all of New Temperance. I bet there aren’t even any empty units.”

  “There was one,” Devi said, and I didn’t like the way she said it. Something was missing from her voice. Sincerity, maybe.

  “It’s okay,” Finn said. “Really.”

  I decided to trust him because he hadn’t let me down yet. And because my shoulder was throbbing and my back was both burning from the demon scratches and cold from the air flowing in through the new ventilation in my old coat. I needed a shower and some antiseptic. And some breakfast.

  They led me to a door on the first floor, near the back of the complex. Anabelle’s parents still lived one floor up, and maybe two doors over.

  “Shhh…” Finn put one finger across his lips while Reese dug a key from his pocket and opened the door. They let me go in first, and I stopped cold after four steps.

  “This isn’t an empty unit. This apartment is furnished!” There were still pictures hanging on the walls. Keys on hooks by the pantry. Coats and scarves peeking out of an open closet.

  “It’s empty now.” Devi pushed past me into the living room, then into the dining area, where she took off her jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. “Close the door.” She shot a look at Reese over my head, then focused on Finn as she walked backward toward the bathroom. “I’m taking a shower. When I get out, I want to talk to Maddock. Got it?”

  Finn nodded and Reese locked the door.

  Before I could start demanding explanations, the second of three doors in the tiny rectangle of hallway opened and a girl appeared, young, petite, and fresh-faced. She reminded me of Melanie, and that made my chest ache.

  Her light brown curls bounced as she raced across the living area and threw herself at Reese, who actually had to lift her off the floor to give her the kiss she obviously wanted.

  I couldn’t help but stare. Kids in New Temperance didn’t kiss in front of people. We kept our sins secret. We stored them in the dark with our hopes and our fears and everything else never meant to see the light of day.

  “That’s Grayson,” Finn mock-whispered. “They’re…close.”

  “So I see.” I looked away from them as if I saw couples kiss on the mouth every day. As if I weren’t scandalized by the fearless audacity of their affection. “Where’s Maddock?”

  Reese set Grayson down, and she studied me for a moment, then looked up at Finn, her brown eyes narrowed in censure. “You didn’t tell her?”

  “Come on.” Reese took Grayson’s hand. “Let’s give them a minute.”

  “Why?” She frowned. Then her gaze traveled to where my hand was linked with Finn’s, and I dropped it, mortified to realize I’d grown so used to the feel of his hand that I’d forgotten I was holding it. “Ohhh…Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh? What’s uh-oh?” My chest felt bruised again. Something was wrong. “What’s wrong with Maddock? Is he scary-looking or something?”

  Finn laughed, but the sound wasn’t natural. “Actually, he’s kinda pretty.”

  Grayson let Reese pull her toward an open doorway, through which I could see the end of a double bed.

  “Reese.” Finn dropped his duffel on the floor and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Do you mind?”

  Reese turned to meet Finn’s gaze and frowned. Then he nodded. Grayson let go of his hand and gave Finn a small smile in acknowledgment of something I still didn’t understand, then went into the bedroom and closed the door.

  “What?” Goose bumps had risen on my skin. Why did Reese get to stay, but not Grayson? What weren’t they telling me? “Where’s Maddock?”

  Finn looked right into my eyes and he tried to grin, but the result looked more like nerves. “Um…The thing is…you’re looking at him.”

  My eyes narrowed at Finn. “I don’t…I don’t know what that means.” I’d heard the words, but they didn’t make any sense.

  Finn ran one hand through his hair. “I know. This is…This is harder than it’s ever been before. Um…” He glanced up at Reese, who stood pressed against the far wall as if he were trying to give us privacy without leaving the room. “You ready? I don’t know how else to do this.”

  I twisted to see Reese nod. Once. Solemnly. When I turned back to Finn, his eyes were closed. They stayed closed for one of the longest seconds of my life.

  When they finally opened, they were the wrong color.

  Finn’s green eyes were now blue. Not blue-green. Not aqua. Bright blue, and as clear as the Caribbean Sea had looked in a film I’d seen in geography my freshman year.

  “What the hell?” I took two steps back in confusion. Then I took three steps forward in fascination, and we were inches apart.

  He blinked, once. Twice. Finn’s forehead furrowed, and then he backed away from me so fast he almost fell. “I…”

  His newly blue eyes widened in bewilderment. He looked…lost.

  “I…,” he said again. Then he looked over my head. “Devi!”

  The bathroom door opened and Devi came out wrapped in a very short brown towel, her long, dark hair dripping wet. She didn’t seem to care that she was practically naked in front of two different guys, with all the lights on, and they seemed no more surprised to see her in a towel than I would have been surprised to see my sister in one, in the privacy of our own home.

  But Devi wasn’t their sister, and this wasn’t their home, and they weren’t really family.

  Did the boys walk around in towels too? I’d never seen a guy in as little as Devi wore.

  And suddenly it occurred to me that even during the carnal rebellion following my sterilization, I’d actually seen and truly experienced very little.

  That was when I noticed that Devi didn’t wear a purity ring.

  She took one look at Finn’s weird blue eyes, and then her face erupted into a huge smile for the first time since I’d met her. She looked stunning in that moment. Immodest and forbidden and relieved and…happy about something I hadn’t yet wrapped my mind around.

  “Maddock!” She shoved me over and threw herself at him, and the only thing holding her towel on was the fact that it was pinched between their bodies. While she kissed Finn. Whom she’d called Maddock. Who kissed her back. And had blue eyes.

  “What the hell?” I turned to Reese, who held up one finger, an obvious request for me to wait a second.

  Wait for what?

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them an instant later, his brown eyes were green. Finn-green. Unmistakably.

  “Nina?” It was Reese’s voice. But they were Finn’s eyes.

  “I don’t…” I retreated until my back hit the wall, my heart thumping so hard I could practically hear it.

  “What’s going on?” Finn said from behind me. Except that what I was starting to understand—in the sense of still being totally lost—was that the Finn I’d met wasn’t really Finn. He was Maddock. “How long was I gone?”

  “Almost two days!” Devi let him go and resecured her towel, preserving what little modesty she had left. “Finn found the new exorcist, then lost her, then she exorcised her mother’s demon and the Church tried to arrest her for matricide, and he played hero. Then he flirted with her while she was vulnerable, and now she’s thoroughly confused.” She turned to me, one hand on the seam in her towel. “Nina, this is Maddock. My boyfriend.”

  “Wow.” Maddock stepped forward and stuck his hand out almost formally, as if his girlfriend weren’t standing there half naked. Tears blurred my vision when I shook his hand. He moved differently from Finn. He held himself differently from Finn. “Good to meet you,” he said, and his voice sounded like Finn, but his words didn’t. “Sorry I missed all the action.”

  When he let go of my hand, I brought my fingers to
my lips, where I could still feel the ghost of Finn’s mouth on mine. Only my memory was really of Maddock’s mouth.

  I glanced at Reese. Then back at Maddock.

  “Oh shit.” Maddock turned to his girlfriend. “He kissed her, didn’t he?”

  She made a disgusted face. “It was completely gratuitous.”

  This coming from a girl in a towel.

  Maddock actually laughed, and even that sounded different from the way Finn had laughed with the same voice. “Did you play nice?”

  Devi gave him a coy smile, and long, straight hair fell over one of her dark eyes. “Don’t I always?”

  He laughed again. “Do you ever?”

  She shrugged and pouted, and wet hair brushed the curve of her backside, over her towel. “What can I say? I don’t like to share.” Devi pulled Maddock toward the bathroom. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” She plucked his damp T-shirt away from his chest, then let it go. “Finn got you all sweaty.”

  “Sorry about this, Nina.” Maddock hung back while Devi tugged on his arm. “I’m sure Finn didn’t mean to tell you like this.” He glanced up at Reese. “Right?”

  Reese nodded. Then he blinked Finn’s green eyes.

  The bathroom door closed behind Devi and Maddock, and pipes groaned within the walls when they turned on the shower. I should have been fundamentally shocked by the bold implication of that sound, but I was too busy being fundamentally confused about everything else.

  I turned to Reese, and my vision cleared a little as the tears standing in my eyes fell. “You’re Finn now?” He nodded and his mouth opened. But then it closed, as if words had abandoned him. “Are you still Reese?”

  Another nod. “The body is Reese. Always was, always will be, if I have anything to say about it. But the rest is me. At the moment.”

  “Can he…Can Reese…see me?”

  “No.” Finn ran one hand through Reese’s light brown hair. “He’s still in here, but he’s kind of…asleep. He can’t see or hear any of this.”

  “I…” There were too many questions to ask. I didn’t know where to start. Then suddenly I did. “Are you a demon?”

  “No.” He shook Reese’s head emphatically, but kept his distance from me, as he had in the alley behind the Grab-n-Go almost twenty-four hours earlier. As if he were afraid I’d back away if he came closer.

  “But you’re possessing someone else’s body. How can you be sure you’re not a demon?”

  He sat on the arm of an overstuffed chair against the wall shared by the small kitchen. “Are you a demon?”

  “Of course not!”

  Reese’s brows rose over Finn’s eyes. “How do you know?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and clung to the righteous anger building inside me, because that was infinitely better than confusion. “I know because I’m not evil, and I can’t possess people, and I don’t come from hell, and I’m not thousands of years old!”

  “All that is the same for me, except for the part about possessing people. And I don’t have any choice about that. Besides, if I were a demon, I’d have been sucked back into hell years ago.” He met my gaze again, and it felt weird to see Finn’s eyes in someone else’s face. “Do you want to sit?”

  “I want to understand.”

  “I know. Me too.” He gestured at the couch behind me, and I sat because the alternative seemed to be passing out from a combination of shock and exhaustion. “Want something to drink?” He was already pulling open the refrigerator door before I could answer. The fridge wasn’t new, but it was newer than the one at my house. And this one actually held food.

  Finn emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of water in one hand and a clear, unlabeled bottle of amber liquid in the other. He held both up, silently asking me to choose. I pointed to the water. I hadn’t had alcohol since I was fifteen, newly sterilized and determined to prove to myself that my body was still my own, no matter what the Church had done to it.

  The Unified Church had no official problem with alcohol, but overindulgence in anything was considered a sin, and any consumption of alcohol by a minor was considered overindulgence. But that had nothing to do with me turning down the…whiskey? I didn’t want a drink because I needed a clear head, and I needed to stay awake until I was sure I was safe, at least for the moment. And I couldn’t do that until I knew how and why Finn was in Reese’s body instead of his own.

  He set the unlabeled alcohol on the counter and carried two bottles of water into the living room, where he handed me one, then sank onto the opposite end of the couch, facing me. “Okay.” He cracked open his bottle. “I know this is weird, and I owe you answers. Probably more answers than I actually have. So…ask me anything.”

  The questions tumbling through my head were so tangled up that separating one from the rest didn’t seem possible. Then my gaze caught on a framed photo standing on the end table. In the picture, a woman in her forties laughed with a girl not much older than I was, who could only have been her daughter.

  “Whose apartment is this?”

  Finn frowned with Reese’s fair features. “After all this, that’s your first question?”

  “Yeah. Who are the women in that picture? Where are they?”

  He twisted to pick up the photo, then studied it while he spoke. “As near as we can tell, the girl is in college. There’s a university pennant on the wall in her room.”

  There used to be lots of colleges in the United States. Lots of choices and opportunity. After the war and the necessary restructuring, only a dozen or so remained. None of those were within a day’s drive of New Temperance, which meant the daughter was unlikely to come home and find her apartment occupied by teenage outlaws.

  “And her mom?”

  “Her mother’s name is Angela Reddy. Ms. Reddy is dead, as of two days ago.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Maddock exorcised the demon. The host’s body died in the process,” he said. “Fortunately, her rent’s paid up until the end of the month, so…”

  “So you killed her, then moved into her apartment.”

  “She was a demon, and she doesn’t need this place anymore, but we do.” His brows rose in a very un-Reese-like challenge. “Have you ever slept in one of the ghost houses? Or in a tent in the badlands?”

  My skin crawled at the thought. Rumor had it, some of the ghost houses still held the bones of the people who’d died there a century before. Many of the houses had become nests for degenerates. And a tent in the badlands? I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the danger that represented—nothing but a sheet of nylon between me and whatever monsters roamed the barren ruins of the Midwest. Tents may be waterproof, but they certainly weren’t degenerate-proof.

  Still, the apartment…

  “It wasn’t coincidence, was it? I mean, the first demon you ran across in New Temperance happened to have an absentee daughter and a paid-up apartment at the back of a complex near the town wall’s north gate?”

  “There are no coincidences.” Finn set the photo on the end table and wedged his bottle of water into the crook of his bent leg. “There are more than a few demons in New Temperance, and we couldn’t take them all on, even if we wanted to. We’re here to get you out, which means we need to fly under the Church’s radar as much as possible, which means minimizing food and supply runs. The best way to do that is to set up camp in a furnished apartment. Of all the demons we saw during recon, the one who lived here had the most ideal setup.” He shrugged Reese’s broad shoulders. “So we sent her back to hell and moved into her apartment.”

  I nodded, still trying to process all of it. It made a certain brutal sense. “How long do you think it’ll be before someone notices her missing from work?”

  Another shrug. “A few more days, hopefully. Devi called in and said she had the flu. They practically begged her to stay home.”

  I cracked open my bottle of water, then stared at it. I was sitting on a dead woman’s couch, drinking a dead woman’s water. Hell, I
was now a dead woman’s daughter. How was it possible that without changing at all, the world we lived in now looked nothing like the world I’d thought I understood twenty-four hours before?

  “How do you do it?” I sipped from the bottle, struggling to bring my thoughts back on track, then screwed the lid back on. “How do you…get in there?” I waved my empty hand at Reese’s body.

  “I don’t know.” He looked surprised by the sudden change in subject. “I’ve never really thought about it. I just kind of…step in. Figuratively speaking, of course, since I don’t actually have any feet.”

  “Why not? Where’s your body?” That was probably the strangest question I’d ever had to ask.

  “I don’t have one.”

  All the questions skittering around in my head stuttered to a stunned halt, and the abrupt internal silence left me reeling. Grasping for his meaning. “What do you mean? How can you not have a body?” A sudden horrible possibility made my heart ache for him. “Are you…dead?”

  He actually laughed, and even in Reese’s voice, the laughter sounded like Finn. “I’m not a ghost, Nina. I just don’t have a body. I never have, at least not as far back as I can remember.”

  “How is that possible? Are you human?”

  “Of course I’m human!” He wasn’t laughing now, and I realized I’d hurt his feelings. I felt bad about that, but my initial fear had taken root again, deep inside me, and I couldn’t think past it.

  People have bodies. Demons don’t, at least in our world—who knows what they look like in their world?

  Only demons could possess someone else’s body. Only demons would want to, right?

  True, I’d never heard of a bodiless demon not getting sucked back into hell, but I’d never heard of a bodiless human at all. Was one really any less believable than the other?